RIGGITY-JIG

Here I am, back in Toronto, but perhaps not entirely. The title to this post is supposed to summon to the reader’s mind that line from Mother Goose: “Home again, home again, riggity-jig” – but when I tried to check the spelling of “riggity” via Google, all I found was “jiggity-jig”… So, am I mis-remembering the rhyme, or did my mother use an unrecorded variant? No answer is available now she’s dead, though asking my siblings what they remember might constitute the next research step.

It’s high summer here and today (Friday) is lovely, bright sun and a breeze, not too hot and not too humid. I arrived back Tuesday evening. By now I’m unpacked and I’ve even gone through the mound of mail waiting for me. It released a stack of journals and books that I may never get through, as well as a handful of letters, including several from my friend Irene in Tasmania. So now my mind is full of memories of Tasmania and I'm tempted by my shelf of Tasmanian books.

But the question in my mind, if not in yours, is where will this blog go now? Perhaps it will become a site for remembering, and for further thinking about our/my experiences in Korea and Japan. For instance, when I walked through the University of Toronto campus this morning I caught sight of several groups of children in matching, brightly-coloured, T-shirts, participants in one or another of the summer day-camps operated out of the University. Those T-shirts conjured up images of the parties of day-care children Peter and I saw when we visited Namsangol Hanok Village in Seoul on one of our first days there. They were playing in the sand, having a picnic lunch under some trees, lined up to look at the traditional houses, and so charming we could have spent the morning watching them.